About a month ago I tweeted out some frustrations about an interview process I had gone through.
Recently interviewed with a major (global) tech company. They absolutely knew me and my background. Still tried to have me run thru multiple rounds of tech interviews.
..thread..
I was really annoyed at what I perceive to have been a waste of my time, so I took some colorful and poetic liberty in describing how it played out and how it made me feel. As is common with venting tweets, I was a bit emotional and over the top. I definitely wasn't very tactful about my views.
In retrospect, I wish I had put more context and level thought into the earlier part of that tweet thread, so that people's first impressions of my take wouldn't have been skewed.
But I was also not exactly and precisely detailing how it actually went down. I figured most who read my tweets would get that it was an emotional illustration, not a court-ready transcript of the proceedings. As usual, that assumption was wrong.
But I want to set the record straight on several things:
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I did not actually roll my eyes at the interviewer. This was figurative language. In fact, there was no camera at all in the interview, only a screenshare and a mic, so even if I did, they wouldn't have seen it.
In my head, I was really annoyed. But I consciously counteracted that by spending the whole time super engaged and enthusiastic to answer all the questions with as much depth and color as I could muster.
You weren't there, so you can't tell if I'm telling the truth or not. But your assumption that I must have treated the interviewer poorly is completely off base. The interviewer went out of their way to thank me for all my demonstrated expertise. They told me they even learned a bit from what I said.
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This company came to me, recruiting me. I didn't just submit an application out of the blue. The hiring manager reached out to me, and used lots of flattering language about how great they know I am and how they've read my books and seen my courses and all that.
In fact, several of the interviewers that I had conversations with said similar things. So it was absolutely clear that they all knew who I was, and knew what my technical reputation on the topics in question.
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Even if they didn't know me at all, google search for my name, and my reputation is evident in that the first 25-30 results are all about me.
In doing so, you'd find I've written almost a dozen books on JS (and sold nearly 200,000 copies worldwide). I've given about 200 conference talks over the span of more than a decade. I've taught more than 5,000 developers across hundreds of workshops given at companies all over the world. And I've created well over 50 OSS projects, putting out many tens of thousands of lines of code I've written.
In short, there's more than enough information out there to, in about 2 minutes of skimming, get a really solid idea of what my technical skills (programming, etc) are.
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Just because I have such a public track record with my technical reputation does not mean I think I'm a special snowflake that deserves to have any job I want with no questions asked. That's what assholes will have you believe, but it's not at all true.
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There was a much larger point to my tweet thread than just venting my frustrations about my interview process. It wasn't really about me, but more about how many people are being screwed by shitty interview processes designed by asshole hiring managers.
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More on that later, but in summary: one-size-fits-all interview processes are exactly what assholes design and put in place at companies because they can't be bothered to actually design good interview processes. Their job is too hard to do well, so they skate by doing a really shitty job, and shitting all over every candidate they come in contact with. And we've all just accepted this as status quo, because scale and because fairness (a gross abuse of that notion).
Not everyone who participates in these interview processes is an asshole, but I have found a strong correlation between those who strongly defend such hiring practices and those who, in my estimation, are assholes. If you're one of the "good ones", fine great, I'm not calling you an asshole. But you're definitely the exception, not the rule.
Yesterday, a few assholes decided to start tweeting with each other some really mean stuff about me, ostensibly because one of them ran across my tweets from a month ago. One of the assholes has protected tweets, so I couldn't even see what they were saying. But I could tell from the replies how shitty the sentiment was. They took my tweets completely out of context, and started insulting me, my past work, etc.
I didn't know it at the time, since they didn't come to me and try to engage in any sort of productive discussion about their disagreements with my take. They didn't ask any questions of me. They didn't seek clarification. They just said really shitty and hurtful things behind my back. I found out a bit later. But it still hurt my feelings.
Then one of those assholes decided to tweet at me with sarcastic insult right out of the gate. The best part? This asshole claims to be a hiring manager, and appealed to his authority on that subject in his insults of me. Apparently I was supposed to feel really bad that they wouldn't have hired me.
Setting our disagreements on the topic aside, the fact that someone (apparently) in charge of hiring developers would engage in public behavior like they did is horrifying. If they treat someone like me that way, can you imagine how shitty they make other candidates feel? Or worse, can you imagine how shitty they act towards candidates behind their back? Maybe they think it's funny to try to take down someone with a public persona. I don't know.
A hiring manager who can't be bothered to take time to gather information, can't be bothered to be respectful (even if they completely disagree), has no interest in deeper context, etc? A hiring manager that would rather right out of the gate start accusing and insulting?
I mean, that's not surprising. But it's still awful. No matter how great that person's company or job might be, I can't even begin to imagine how miserable it would be to work for them.
This asshole went on to write a really thin and uninsightful blog post that was sort of about the topic, but really just an excuse to throw more insults at me.
From what I can tell reading this piece, this asshole has a really naive take on what hiring should be about. I feel bad for their company (whatever it is) that this person is who candidates get their first impression from.
But enough about that asshole.
These folks would have you believe that because I pointed out that I've written books on the topic I was being interviewed about, I felt like that entitled me to skip the interview altogether and just be hired on the spot.
This is not what I ever said, or an opinion I hold.
In fact, while I used my experience as a launching off point, the much bigger intent was to shine light (as I have done many times in the past) on why such asshole-designed interviewing processes are not just annoying for people like me, but are actively gatekeeping and discriminatory against a whole range of others who don't fit the one-size-fits-all cookie cutter interview process.
I actually ran interviewing at most of the jobs I worked at. I've been independent for the last 8+ years, but prior to that I held a slew of jobs over a span of nearly 15 years, and I was almost always the one the team relied on for doing technical interviewing of candidates.
I think part of that is because I know my technical stuff pretty well. But I think another part is that they know that my approach is to try to elevate the human above the technology, to try to find the best candidate, not just to apply the most rigid ruleset.
Across all the hundreds of interviews I conducted for candidates in that time, I saw a lot of developers who completely crumbled in the "whiteboard screening" type of interview format. In fact, it happened more often than not. So I learned that this was a bad format. That's where I formed my initial impressions of why hiring is so broken.
Of course, I had started doing it the way I had always been interviewed. But I realized how terrible it was.
I switched my approach (over time). I started focusing on trying to help the candidate show me their best side. I started tailoring the conversation and questions to respond to what I was seeing and hearing. I started trying to pull out their best instead of trying to filter them out based on their worst. I felt it was my job to put them in the best possible light.
Over time, I realized how many more great candidates I found with this different approach. Folks who would have bombed the typical tech interview instead blossomed and shone bright when given a chance to be their best in the interview.
We hired a bunch of really great folks over that time that I am pretty sure would have never been hired if we had kept running interviewing the way I had been interviewed to get in there.
So a big part of what motivates me to keep trying to tear down these shitty interviewing institutions and processes is because I am absolutely convinced that so many of these companies are missing out on some of the greatest hires.
And why? Because they let selfish, narrow-minded assholes design the interview.
My tweet rant wasn't about me having a wasteful interview. It was about how poor interview design is so unfair to most candidates. Is it surprising that people design interview processes to select for more people like themselves, and then roar in defense if anyone criticizes the process? It's called survivor bias.
If that company can't interview me well (whether they hire me or not!), with all the extra information that's out there about me helping aid their contextual decisions, imagine how many thousands they are completely failing to even get in the door.
It's a sure bet that many of them are way better fit for those jobs than I would be. But these asshole-designed interview processes will never find them. I'm fine, I'll find work. But I feel really sad for so many that aren't as lucky and privileged as I am.
As I said, I had no expectation that my technical reputation would allow me to skip all (or even most) of the interview process. Assholes will say that's what I meant, but it isn't. I've publicly written about this many times, so if someone bothered to get to know anything at all about me, they would clearly see that context.
I do think my public and verifiable reputation should have substituted for the initial tech screen that I spent (wasted) an hour on. I've worked really hard to get to where I'm at, and I've also worked hard to put my whole self out there, warts and shit and all, so that I'm easy to judge. Some people like me, others really don't. That's OK.
But there's a ton of other really important things that interviewing should be figuring out, absolutely none of which are found in these technical screen interviews. I was so dismayed because I really wanted to spend my time showing them all I have to offer (far beyond the code I can write), but we wasted our time checking to make sure I could write a for-loop.
I absolutely wanted to engage in a long, in-depth job interview process. I wanted to get to know them, and I wanted them to get to know me. I don't think they, or I, should waste an hour long tech interview on something that can easily be established in the first 14 seconds of googling about me.
Even with my technical expertise on the table, there's a whole bunch of valid reasons why they may not want to hire me, and a whole bunch of reasons why I may not want to take the job. Why can't we spend all of our time working on those important questions?
I would love for them, after the first 10 minutes of chatting, to just say, "listen, you clearly have the technical skills, but I'm not getting a good sense of fit from our conversation." That would be a glorious outcome! I would love to get that signal 10 minutes in, instead of 10 (wasted) hours in.
You see, I wasn't expecting to glide into any job I wanted at this company. I expected the opposite. I expected that there were a lot of hurdles to overcome. I'm not the easiest person to get along with. I have tons of really strong opinions, and most people won't like how strongly I hold them. I suspected that I probably would not get the job, but I wanted to at least give it the full effort such an endeavor requires.
What I was hoping (not expecting) was that I was dealing with a company that knew that wasting our time on writing for loops wasn't good for them or for me, and that we could instead shorten the cycle to focus on the important stuff.
But the story didn't end with that technical screen. I was annoyed at the mutual waste of our time, but I figured that at least that technical vetting was out of the way. As I said in the tweet thread, the interviewer said they had no follow-up questions because I had so completely answered the question, more than they'd ever seen before. I assumed that because I hit that homerun out of the park, according to them, that we could now finally get to the good and important interviewing work.
But nope.
No, instead they said that I would now move on to a 5 hour long set of further technical interviews, with several complex esoteric computer science algorithms involved...
What in the absolute fuck? Are you kidding me?
We still can't have a meaningful interview about all the important stuff, because your rigid one-size-fits-all process dictates that you, robot, must first screen the candidate, then must next do a deep computer science vetting of the candidate, then... that there's no humanity involved, no clear recognition of what the optimal interview process should be at this point?
I pulled out of the interviewing process with them because I felt really strongly that there was such a clear value mismatch between what that company finds important (and selects for in hiring) and what I think is important in people I want to work with.
I alluded to having strong reservations about this mismatch in my email to the hiring manager, hoping the manager would ask for more information so that I could share why I thought it was so poorly designed.
Instead, that manager just thanked me for my time and that was it. No follow-up questions or anything.
I waited two whole weeks (and interviewed at several other companies) before then deciding to tweet out my thoughts.
So far all I've done is rail against what I think we shouldn't be doing. To be productive and move forward, we need to talk about what interviewing should be, at least according to me.
But this whole post is far too long already. So I'm going to focus the next post on that topic. Read "What Hiring Should Look Like" here.
I've repeatedly called some of you assholes here, and talked about how shitty you treat people like me, and so many other candidates. I stand by those assertions.
But that's not the end of the story. You could choose to be less of an asshole, and choose to care more about people like me, and more about those who you seek to hire.
You could ask more questions instead of hurling offensive insults. You could treat others like equals instead of dripping with condescension from the first tweet.
I don't know if you will, but I wish you would consider it. The discourse around this important topic would so much more useful if there were fewer assholes making noise, and more of us accepted our mutual human flaws and acted with empathy and respect to each other.
And that admonition goes for myself, especially, because I am (at times) quite the asshole, too. For my part in that, I'm sorry.
I wish this wasn't an extension of a Twitter fight, the language really takes away from some good points you made.
I wish you named the company rather than the person who called out your tweet.